Between writing the Academy Award–winning screenplay for Gosford Park and creating his Emmy Award–winning BBC/Masterpiece production Downton Abbey, Julian Fellowes penned this delightfully wicked little comedy. "The English, of all classes as it happens, are addicted to exclusivity. Leave three Englishmen in a room and they will invent a rule that prevents a fourth joining them," he quips Wilde-ishly in this tale of Edith Lavery, an English blonde of the middle classes, with large eyes and nice manners, who snags herself a member of the castled aristocracy, Charles, the Earl Broughton. But is it Charles or the title and trappings she fancies? Our Edith will be put to the test when a television company and their gorgeous leading man descend upon Broughton Hall to film a period drama.

"Snobs is everything you would hope for from the writer of Gosford Park. A delicious thoroughbred delight, a guilty treat that is awake to every maddening and appallingly attractive nuance of English social life. The novel somehow contrives to be moral without being preachy or losing for a minute its gracefully shameless delight in the well bred and their satellites. A kind of Louis Auchincloss for our times, Julian Fellowes has written a book that is destined to grace all the bedside tables of all the better houses in the land."—Stephen Fry